The cheat codes to employer brand content on LinkedIn

What is employer branding?

Your employer brand should be about people and stories rather than high-level values

Employer branding is incredibly important in today’s job market. It helps create a good company culture, makes employees feel more connected to their coworkers, and increases productivity. Having a strong sense of your company’s identity also helps with recruiting. 

Telling the company’s story is a great way to stand out and show a company’s atmosphere. And because the best way to tell your employer story is through relatable employer brand content and by making people feel connected to your brand, social media - where you can post down-to-earth and regular examples of your company’s work culture - is the best place to build your employer brand. 

In 2021, increasing brand image through social media was one of recruiters’ top priorities. 3 people are hired through LinkedIn every minute. It’s crystal clear: recruiters and employer brand specialists are going online to share their company stories and to attract candidates. 

But are they doing it right? There are many ways you can build an employer brand. You can revamp your website to match your company’s mission and values. You can monitor your employees feelings about the organization. While these all work well, they are sometimes too high-level to resonate with candidates - especially on social media. People care about employer values. But when it comes down to it, candidates aren’t applying to a job because they like the values that were listed on your LinkedIn profile. They’re more likely to resonate with stories about current employees, examples of your company’s work-life balance, or anything that relates to the day-to-day job they’re interested in. 

As a general rule, until people see company values portrayed concretely, they probably won’t buy them. If you want your employer brand to stand out and to help with recruitment, you need to get personal. 

How to tell a compelling story when…

Employer branding is the process of building your employer brand: the company’s reputation and the image it gives the outside world. 

A powerful social media employer brand strategy will help: 

- Attract and talk to high-value candidates more quickly

- Fill positions more quickly

- Increase employee retention 

Employer brand-related company posts on social media can be broken down into four main categories: 

- Posting about company milestones, achievements and awards

- Posting about employee stories and testimonials

- Sharing job openings and promoting open roles

- Sharing useful resources like interviews, blog posts, webinars…

In each case, you can tell a more compelling employer brand story by getting more personal and specific. Here’s how: 

Other things to consider when you’re posting to LinkedIn…

1. When you’re posting about milestones and awards

Celebrating employee or company milestones is a great way to show your company’s identity and to boost your employer brand. But rather than just focussing on the big picture milestones, use each small achievement to tell a compelling story. Did one of your employees get married? Celebrate that! Promoted? Post a congratulatory message. Every month, Course Hero showcases their campus reps of the month. This is a great way of boosting employee branding, because it’ll help people feel proud about the company they’re working at. Don’t forget to ask for consent before posting something private, though! 

‍

You can also post about company milestones, but focus on the daily impacts these might have on people. If your company’s been nominated - or has won - an award, post about that. And show people why you’ve been nominated by sharing an employee testimonial. If you’re celebrating your 3rd company birthday, share it with the people of LinkedIn by posting a photo of the cake you got for the office. When it comes to social media, anything can be turned into a cause for celebration. And a positive, celebratory LinkedIn feed will do wonders to your employer brand. 

‍

‍

Pro tip: Keep an equal balance between company milestone celebrations and employee milestone celebrations.

‍‍2. When you’re posting about employee stories and testimonials

Posting employee stories and testimonials is a great way of getting personal and showing your LinkedIn followers how you treat the people working at the company. But these testimonials can often seem rigid and disingenuous. The key to making employee testimonials impactful on social media is to make them as natural as possible. Showing off people’s personalities, and making it easy for anyone to feel like they know the employees of the company is great. It adds a little humanity to your hiring process, and to your employer brand. In fact, letting employees take control of the employer brand is probably the most compelling way to attract new candidates on social media. For you, that means focusing on producing content that showcases employees and helps people understand each role at the company. 

For example, imagine the VP of Engineering at NEWNESS has been in contact with Jane, a candidate for the Software Engineer role NEWNESS is trying to recruit for. Jane is about to interview with the VP and decides to look at the company LinkedIn page to prep. She sees this :

This snippet of conversation makes it a lot easier for Jane to connect with Cyrus. She can now put a name and a voice to the person behind the emails. Hiring has been made more human. 

‍Pro tip: Get executives involved and increase transparency. When applying to jobs, people are interested in hearing from the executive team and the leaders of the company. If you can get your CEO, and other people that can speak to the company’s story, it’ll help your employer brand stand out.

3. When you’re sharing job openings and promoting open roles

Sharing your open roles is a huge part of employer branding on LinkedIn. Posting job openings is the fastest way to start a conversation with candidates. It should definitely be included as part of your LinkedIn Employer Brand strategy. There’s definitely an art to this though. Here are two golden rules to follow: 

1- Don’t post job openings too frequently. Employer branding on LinkedIn is about so much more than finding interesting candidates. It’s about building a community centered around your company culture and interacting with them. If you keep posting about job openings, you run the risk of seeming disingenuous with your other posts. And it might alienate those followers that aren’t looking for a job but otherwise love the content you produce. 

2- Make sure there’s something to catch your viewer’s eye. People see plenty of job openings on LinkedIn. As with any other aspect of employer branding on social media, you should aim for creativity. 

Here are a few ideas: 

- Post a fun fact about the team the person would be hired into. 

- Post a photo of the work space, or a fun zoom meeting if you’re remote. 

- You can outsource your creativity: at Puck, we produce mini-podcasts with interviews of people on your team that can be easily shared and used to promote job openings on LinkedIn.

For example, HealthSherpa got creative with their job openings. By adding a testimonial from Carly, a senior software engineer on the engineering team, this job posting definitely stands out from the crowd. It lets people know about one of the employees on the team, it’s a video format that is designed to catch the eye of a mindless scroller, and it links back to the job page for the open role. 

4. When you’re sharing useful resources like interviews, blog posts, webinars…

Did you know that LinkedIn has 15x more content impressions than job postings? It’s a platform that’s widely used to share industry insights. When you’re sharing a useful resource on Linkedin, you can make that part of your employer brand content. Sharing articles and posts that are relevant to your company’s field is a great way to show off some of the company’s interests and values, and well as your mission and goals. Make it a point to educate your audience, and the type of content you share will say a great deal about your employer brand. 

If your company has a blog, LinkedIn is a great place to post your own content as well. For example, CoderPad frequently shares their blog posts to LinkedIn. Not only is this a great way of increasing reach for your blog, it’ll boost your employer brand on LinkedIn, too.

‍

Another way you can share useful resources on LinkedIn is by interacting with your followers.This is what Thyme Care, a company in the HealthTech space, does. They interact with followers on LinkedIn by using polls, and asking questions they can have conversations about in the future. 

‍

Now that you know how to make your LinkedIn posts tell a compelling employer story, here are other things to consider as you’re getting ready to publish. 

5. Use video and audio over images

Here are some interesting statistics: 

- LinkedIn users are 20x more likely to re-share a video post than any other form of post. 

- 41% of employers planned to explore video marketing on LinkedIn in 2020

General LinkedIn rule: multimedia = good. They’re good because they generally get more reach than other forms of content, meaning more people see them and interact with them. Now of course, as with everything in life, moderation is key. Don’t restrict your posts to ONLY video content . Post that interesting article you read, and it might get plenty of reach. 

But knowing that video content performs better than simple images can help when you’re putting together posts. 

Pro tip: you don’t have to change anything about your current posting schedule, if you already have one in place. If you have images - such as portraits, or sentences - that you were planning on posting, you can simply convert that image to a video file, and voila! LinkedIn will classify it as a video and you’ll get all the reach benefits. 

6. Have a complete LinkedIn profile 

This one is about telling personal stories, but it’s a really important first step. It might be obvious, but if it isn’t done yet you should absolutely start with this. 79% of people look for jobs on social media. And do you know what the first thing someone does when they find a job they might like? You guessed it: they look up the company on LinkedIn. Make it as easy as possible for them to understand your company. Link to your website, add your salary ranges, make employees visible on your home page so candidates can reach out. When it comes to the information you should provide on your company profile, less is definitely not more. 

7. Get employees involved

This last tip isn’t so much about employer branding, but rather employee branding: getting your employees involved in the process of showing off your company culture. On LinkedIn, this is particularly important to increase your reach - which is useful when you’re doing a big referral drive, for example. The best, not so secret, advice when it comes to getting employees involved is to tag them in your posts.

Pro tip: To successfully get employees to share open roles, remember two things: 1) If there’s a copy template to help them get started, they’re more likely to post. 2) Be specific about your ask. If you’re hiring for a senior marketing manager, ask the marketing team to share the role. They’re more likely to have other marketers as part of their LinkedIn network. 

At Puck, we make social referrals as easy as clicking a button. We’re on a mission to make hiring more human. As part of that, we believe that people and their stories should be at the center of your employer brand strategy. We are a recruitment marketing company and we’re expert storytellers. 

We interview team leaders and produce mini-podcasts that can be shared on social media or directly on the company’s job pages. This helps candidates understand the company and the role they’re applying to, all while discovering more about the people that work and lead there. Customers also build a library of content they can reuse in employer branding or other marketing efforts. 

‍